In an act of deep sympathy and ecstatic transformation, Michelle Williams has delivered another astonishing performance in a career full of them. And it takes place in the most unlikely places.
One might assume that the audiobook for Britney Spears’ memoir “The Woman in Me” was narrated by the author – who is no stranger to acting herself. But in the book’s introduction, Spears explains on the microphone that the book’s subject matter is too emotional for her to read out loud. And so it is the five-time Oscar nominee’s job to express the contours of Spears’ life.
It’s a smart and surprising decision. The first time in a long time that many people heard Britney Spears’ voice – not her unique singing voice that we had become accustomed to from endless radio repeats, but her simple, everyday speaking voice – was startling and raw. Her 2021 testimony in a California court asking the judge to end her ongoing conservatorship was nervous and adamant; Emotions pulsed in a way that almost seemed to burst. It was this emotional power that made her arguments as clear as her words. And Spears’ introduction to the book plays out similarly, with the sultry feeling of blurting out her truth all at once. Williams, one step further removed from the story, brings a cooler touch to Spears’ sense of injustice and the ups and downs of her life.
This touch, this delicate distance from the hard times Spears has lived through, allows Williams to seamlessly immerse herself in and then bridge the eras of Spears’ life. She doesn’t necessarily put on an accent, but she evokes an affect ten degrees more folksy than her own, as Spears remembers his childhood; A moment in which Spears recalls being in love on the set of “The Mickey Mouse Club” and declares, “My little heart just fell to the ground!” allows Williams to simultaneously convey the lightness with which a child can be in love, and at the same time a remorseful adult’s retrospective feeling of how dramatic children can be. (There’s a similar moment of painfully earnest naivety later, when she describes her joy at living with her husband and children in a house with a slide leading to the pool, leaving my own little heart on the floor.)
Williams is funny here, too, in the observant and offbeat way that Spears — who reminds us she was a “Saturday Night Live” host twice — is funny. A clip of Williams mimicking Spears’ reminiscence of Justin Timberlake and desperately trying to impress rapper Ginuwine with faux street cred has gone viral – repeating cringe-worthy 2000s slang with a touch of white boy confidence. And mirth slips into her voice as she describes how spoiled younger sister Jamie Lynn Spears’ life resembled the pop song “7 Rings” – an observation that might otherwise sound cold. Williams recaptures the character throughout: a slight indulgence creeps into the actress’s voice as she recalls the peak of Spears’ music career, when she felt, as the text puts it, “like a woman and a child rolled into one.” felt. Williams brings the innocence of a child and the experience of an adult to the phrase and the sweet memories of it. And when Spears interrupts her recollection of a long letter Timberlake wrote to her after their breakup to say, “I want to cry when I think about it,” it seems as if a thought or feeling flashed through Williams’ mind flowing through her heart at this moment.
Spears’ greatest gift in her acting career was her ability to find her way to inspiring precision through endless practice. The tragedy that she experienced was that her preternatural ability to make perfectly fine dance moves overshadowed a real woman’s emotional life – full of unresolved childhood traumas and adult challenges – with no one in her life able to help her. Williams finds her way to either side of Spears, illustrating with emphatic energy the joy she felt in the rehearsal room and the confusion and loneliness she felt, with a wistfulness that somehow never seems forced. She brings her character from childhood to adulthood without losing sight of certain constants: the feeling of loneliness, the need for protection, the joy of performing.
But maybe Williams is cut out for this. (The only other actress in her class who would have done a similarly elegant job might be Natalie Portman, who knows how to play both grief and perfectionism, but also appears literally as Spears’ friend in the text.) Williams’ persona exists alongside the text of “The Woman in Me” and superimposes it like a color filter, giving Spears’ story new shades and new perspectives. Perhaps Williams’ best on-screen performance was as a mother consumed by the loss of her children in “Manchester by the Sea.” As Williams, according to Spears, expresses the feeling of deep isolation after losing custody of her sons, we hear again that almost impossible grief. And lately, Williams has specialized in playing women whose artistic ambitions collide with the realities of life, slowing them down and frustratingly stalling them. In the story of a woman liberated through song and then trapped in a labyrinth of contracts and obligations, we hear the abandoned dancer of “Fosse/Verdon,” the endlessly imposed sculptor of “Showing Up,” the mother who she It’s hard to find her artistic ability in “The Fabelmans.” From “My Week With Marilyn,” we may hear a little about the Marilyn Monroe that no director believed could be a real actress.
And it is Marilyn’s role as a woman who lived as a target for the world’s scornful gaze that points to another painful similarity. This film is based on the feeling that Williams went through a crisis not unlike Spears’, albeit with a different outcome. She was a teenage star who had to fight her way to artistic respectability and faced intense and cruel scrutiny in her personal life following the death in 2008 of Heath Ledger, who was her romantic partner and father of her child. The furore surrounding Ledger’s death began the same month that Spears was suspended against her will for 72 hours, setting off a series of events that led to her conservatorship. Williams emerged from her era as the biggest story in the world; Spears seems to be starting to do that.
But the scale of Spears’ fame has a certain alienating effect: It’s hard, when reading The Woman in Me, to grapple with the idea that it’s Spears herself telling the story, just because, well, As the saying goes, “It’s Britney.”, bitch.” Other people have spoken for her for so long that our default setting is to understand her through one interlocutor, through another’s interpretation. Ironically, it is here that Williams’ performance gains its power and meaning. Williams sits far enough away from the story to find small moments within it to emphasize and play out a larger story arc, speaking as Spears but not for her. She breathes life into a story that the person who lived through it finds too emotional to say out loud. Williams’ performance as Spears helps honor this much-maligned pop singer as an artist. And it is itself a great art.